Obsidian Publish is the official way to put a vault online, but it isn’t the only one — and it isn’t designed for every kind of site. There is more than one good way to publish notes from Obsidian. Which one fits depends on what you are publishing, who maintains it and what else the site needs to do. This guide compares three approaches on what they are designed for, not on which is “best”.
Feature descriptions of third-party products come from their own sites at the time of writing; check them before you decide, since products change.
1. Obsidian Publish
Obsidian Publish is the official publishing service from the makers of Obsidian. You choose notes in your vault and publish them to a hosted site.
It is built around the way Obsidian itself works. Its site lists reader features such as hover previews, a graph view, stacked pages and backlinks, plus a custom domain, password protection, themes customizable with CSS and JavaScript, and collaboration with a team.
Designed for: publishing a vault — or part of one — as an interconnected set of notes, with the navigation readers of a knowledge base expect.
2. A static site generator
Static site generators turn a folder of Markdown files into a website you host yourself. Some are general purpose, like Hugo or Jekyll. Others focus on notes: Quartz describes itself as “a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites”.
You get full control over the design and the output. In exchange, you set up the project, choose where to host it, and maintain the build over time. Quartz, for example, runs on Node.js and is usually deployed from a Git repository to a static host such as GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages or Netlify.
Designed for: people who are comfortable with a code project and want complete control of the result.
3. Sentilis
Sentilis publishes notes from your vault to your Sentilis profile. With the Sentilis plugin, you right-click a note and choose Publish to Press; the plugin resolves Obsidian embeds and attachments. The Sentilis CLI publishes whole folders from the terminal or CI. There is no project to build or host.
Each file becomes one thing on your profile, depending on the folder it lives in: a post or documentation page (Press), a bio page (Bio), a product or service with checkout (Market), a monthly membership (Prime) or a work in a visual portfolio (Gallery).
Designed for: writers and creators who want their notes to become a professional presence — posts, docs, a bio, and things to sell — without maintaining a site.
Side by side
| Obsidian Publish | Static site generator | Sentilis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source files | Your vault | Markdown in a project folder | Markdown in your vault or any folder |
| Publishing | From Obsidian | Build and deploy | Right-click in Obsidian (plugin) or CLI |
| Hosting | Included | You choose and maintain it | Included |
| Design control | Themes (CSS/JS) | Complete | Sentilis layouts |
| Note-graph features | Yes (graph, backlinks, hover previews) | Depends on the generator | No |
| Selling products or memberships | Not a listed feature | Needs extra services | Yes (Market, Prime) |
How to choose
- If your notes are a web of links and readers should explore them like a vault, a tool built for linked notes — Obsidian Publish or a notes-focused generator — is the natural fit.
- If you want total control and enjoy maintaining a code project, use a static site generator.
- If you want your writing to become a site with posts, docs, a bio and products, and you would rather not maintain anything, try Sentilis.
Nothing stops you from combining them: the notes are plain Markdown files, and they stay yours whichever you pick.